"Maybe a guard. Maybe a food guy. But we've hit a blank wall trying to find another candidate among the inmates…"

"Yeah…"

"We gotta go back there. We've got to look at tapes for the last two days."

"Goddamn," Sloan said, more to himself than to Lucas. "Is this possible?"

18

DR.CALE WAS WAITING in his office. Their escort dropped them, and Cale shut the door. "All right: What's going on?"

"We need to see the tapes for the isolation cells for the past two days," Sloan said.

Cale rocked on his feet, his hands in his jacket pocket: "Why?"

"We want to see who's been talking to the Big Three," Lucas said.

Cale drifted down his wall of books and papers, looked at a plaque, then said, sadly, "Nobody talks to them but staff."

Lucas said, "That's why we need to see them."

Cale continued drifting along the books, turned the corner at his desk, sat in his swivel chair, and turned until his back was toward them, and he was looking out the window at the Minnesota woods and the river valley beyond. "You think a member of the staff might be passing them information?"

"Something like that," Lucas said, his voice cool, neutral.

Cale hadn't become head of the hospital by being stupid: he swiveled to face them, took off his glasses, rubbed one eye with the heel of a hand, and said, "Oh, boy. Who are you looking at? Grant?"

"Why do you say Grant?" Lucas asked.

"He's the new guy. Been here less than a year. The other guys have been here longer."

"Grant would be interesting," Lucas said. "Any reason to think…?"

"He sometimes seems a little naive… uncertain of what he's doing. He seems to struggle," Cale said. "But that's often the sign of a good therapist-a guy who doesn't fall into routine and cliche."

"Is he good?"

"He is good," Cale said. "He has a fine touch with patients, especially the lost souls. You know, the quiet ones, the helpless ones-well, like Mike West. And I have to say, he came highly recommended."

"Doesn't have to be a therapist," Lucas said. "Could be anybody who's had intimate contact with the Big Three."

"That's a lot of people. Until they went into isolation, at least. Dozens of people, including staff members, in here," Cale said. "Then there are outsiders. We contract for some medical services, for exam-ple, and Biggie, in particular, has been having problems. He's a borderline diabetic, he's got circulatory problems, and his PSAs are out of sight. He's gonna lose his prostate in the next few years."

"We need a list of the outside docs," Lucas said. "We still want to see the tapes."

"Okay. Let me call Security. They can put you in the monitoring room and run them right there."

"We could use a little privacy," Lucas said. "But we'd also like somebody who can identify the people going in and out."

"I'll get you Leon Jansen. He's one of our security people, knows everybody, and he can keep his mouth shut."

"And he doesn't have access to Biggie."

"No. Not since they went into isolation, anyway."

CALE CALLED JANSEN on a voice pager; he showed up a couple of minutes later, a tall black man with a hard face and close-cropped hair. He wore a small green crescent moon on a chain around his neck, which Lucas recognized as some kind of Muslim symbol. Cale introduced Lucas and Sloan and explained the problem. Jansen said, "Most unusual. Well. Come this way."

"Wish I could wish you good luck," Cale said as they went out the door.

Lucas and Sloan followed Jansen back out through the hospital, toward the security wall. "Are you conversant with our security structure?" Jansen asked. His language was formal, almost academic.

"We've been through the wall a few times…"

"The cage is essentially a booth with armored glass on all sides. From the outside, you have to go through the barred door to get to the security booth. The door closes, and then you go through the scanner process…"

"We did all that," Sloan began.

Jansen ignored him and continued. "When you're cleared through the scanner, the person manning the booth opens the interior barred door, and you can proceed. The point here is, you can't open both doors at once. There's an electronic interlock that won't allow it. The people in the booth are completely isolated from the outside. While they're in there, it would take military munitions to get them out. Gas won't work, guns won't work."

"And that's where you monitor the cells from," Lucas said.

"Yes."

"Could the guys inside the booth talk to the inmates through the intercom system?"

"Of course. And they do," Jansen said. "They're on the tape."

"Could somebody turn off the tape?"

"Could… but it'd be apparent in the time code, and the recorder notes when the tape is taken down. Also, the cage is about the size of two bedrooms, and there are always at least three people in there. You couldn't have a conversation that's not overheard." He put a finger along the side of his nose, like Santa Claus, thinking, then said, "But you know, given human nature… the monitoring room is at the far end, and there's a door that closes between the monitoring area and the main booth. You might find some excuse to close the door, and then talk to an inmate… but I would find that odd."

"Huh."

THE EXTERIOR DOOR slid open as they came up to it. They stepped through it, into the middle space where the cage was, and the door closed behind them. Cale had called ahead, and when both the interior and exterior barred doors were closed and locked, one of the people inside the cage popped a door and Jansen led them inside.

"We need to look at some tapes, people," Jansen said to the three people in the booth, two women and a man. "Dr. Cale has probably talked to you, so you know that we're required to view them privately."

"What're you looking for?" the male guard asked.

"Don't know," Sloan said genially. "We're looking at the Big Three, and anything would help."

"This way," Jansen said. He took them into a second small room, where one wall held three dozen small monitoring screens and a couple of larger ones. Only half of them were turned on.

"We monitor the isolation rooms constantly, and tape them. We also monitor what we call 'watch rooms,' where we put people who might be at some risk of attempting suicide, and also the high-risk individuals, like the Big Three," Jansen said. "The rest of the cameras are scanners and are meant to pick up disturbances in the hallways and recreational areas and so on."

"We're interested in the Big Three, back three days," Lucas said.

BY FAST-FORWARDING, they got through the tapes for the Big Three in two hours. The three had no privacy at all: they used the toilet, masturbated, exercised, slept, screamed, ate before, the unblinking camera eye. At first, it carried a voyeuristic fascination; two days in, they just wanted it to end. The boredom was grinding, and Lucas began to empathize with Chase's wish to die. Lucas looked for seams in the tape, where it might have shut down; but it was seamless. Nobody, as far as they could tell, had said anything about the Peterson killing.

"Could it be a code word, telling them that the killing was done?" Sloan asked. Jansen glanced sideways at him, an idiot glance, and Sloan said, defensively, "All right, it's not a code word."

"There's gotta be something," Lucas said. He'd written down a list of names of the people who'd gone through the security area; there were thirty of them.

"Every single person you've seen in there-half the staff, I didn't know that many people went in and out, to tell you the truth-but every single person knows he's on tape," Jansen said.